Theorizing Justice in Contemporary Arabo-Islamic Philosophy: A Transcultural Approach with Fatima Mernissi and Mohammed Arkoun

What is justice from the perspective of contemporary Arabo-Islamic philosophy? Kaouther Karoui takes a transcultural approach, open to different philosophical traditions, and seeks to decenter Western notions of normativity. She focuses on two thinkers, namely the feminist Fatima Mernissi (d.2015) and Mohammed Arkoun (d.2010), a well-known critic of hegemony and orthodoxy. She situates their thinking within current debates among Arab thinkers and brings their ideas into dialog with Western political philosophy. This study thus challenges stereotypes about the Arab-Islamic world by discussing postcolonial theories of gender justice, political freedom, and religion.

Kaouther Karoui, born in 1987, works as a research assistant within the cluster of excellence »Religion and Politics« at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster (WWU). Prior to this, she worked for the DFG-funded research project »Diversity, Power, and Justice: Transcultural Perspective« at Universität Kassel and at Universität Koblenz-Landau from 2016 to 2019. From 2019 to 2022 she worked as a research assistant at the Philosophy Department of WWU Münster.